Public outcry ends New Orleans’ efforts to turn down the volume

They came with their trumpets. With their trombones and their tubas, too.

They came to make a lot of noise.

And they silenced an effort to turn down the volume in one of America’s loudest cities.

LOUD AND PROUD: Musicians from around New Orleans descended on city hall last week to protest a noise ordinance that some say would cost jobs and business.

Specifically, some 300 musicians who gathered outside New Orleans City Hall last Friday wanted to show their opposition to a proposed noise ordinance that would have set lower legal limits for decibel levels in the French Quarter. The new rules would have also changed how the police measured the level of noise before deciding if a citation was in order.

“The thing a noise ordinance has to have foremost in mind is the music and culture of the city, which is a huge part of our history and our traditions here,” said Hannah Kreiger-Benson, spokeswoman for the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, a broad-based group that includes musicians, artists, venue owners, music lovers and even lawyers.

It’s a group that believes “music and culture people have to be a part of the policy and government process,” said Kreiger-Benson, who makes her living playing the piano and trumpet and works with MACCNO in her free time.

The two council members pushing for the ordinance said they wanted to target bars and nightclubs that were becoming a nuisance to residents.

But the musicians who make noise to make a living said the ordinance was too broad.

It would have lowered the maximum decibel level in the French Quarter of the city, the part most well-known for its music scene, to 70 decibels from the current level of 80 decibels. Because of the way sound is measured, that equates to almost a 50 percent cut in legal noise levels.

The French Quarter Business Association objected to how quickly the ordinance was moving through the City Council and questioned the consequences of its possible passage. Though some provisions were targeted only at Bourbon Street, the new rules could hurt commercial and residential areas too, the group warned.

More concerning for Kreiger-Benson and her musician friends was the threat the ordinance posed to some bars and clubs, which many freelance musicians rely on for financial support.

MARCHIN IN: The City Council pulled the noise ordinance off the agenda a day before the scheduled protest, but that didn’t stop some musicians from wanting to bury the proposal – with typical jazz funeral style.

“People would have lost their jobs,” said Kreiger-Benson. “You would scare music and culture-producers from producing music and culture because they would be concerned about running afoul of the law.”

She said she didn’t see the proposed ordinance as a malicious attempt to silence the cultural noise of New Orleans, but worries the stricter laws could be used in a subjective way to target certain groups.

And last week, those same musicians made their mark.

With the noise ordinance set for a hearing Friday, the MACCNO planned to have some members show up and speak about the new rules. But after it became apparent there would be too many people to fit into council chambers, a musical sit-in outside City Hall was planned, with performers from across the city’s eclectic music scene.

Kreiger-Beson said the group was preparing for more than 1,000 people to show up – they found local restaurants to volunteer their bathrooms to the cause and called all the food trucks they could find.

The City Council tried to cancel the party.

Thursday evening, less than a day before the hearing on the ordinance was supposed to take place, the proposal was abruptly pulled from the agenda and the meeting was cancelled.

In place of the broad ordinance affecting the entire French Quarter, the council members now plan to study a more focused approach to address only Bourbon Street, without affecting the rest of the French Quarter, according to newspaper reports.

“We assure the public that our work to create workable and reasonable laws that preserve our music culture and industry has not stalled, but will continue in earnest,” said Stacy Head and Kristin Gisleson Palmer, the two council members who head the committee overseeing the proposal, in a joint-statement.

In New Orleans, the music will continue. So will the government.

Boehm is a reporter for Watchdog.org and can be reached at EBoehm@Watchdog.org. Follow @EricBoehm87 and @WatchdogOrg on Twitter for more.

Eric is a reporter for Watchdog.org and former bureau chief for Pennsylvania Independent. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he enjoys great weather and low taxes while writing about state governments, pensions, labor issues and economic/civil liberty. Previously, he worked for more than three years in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, covering Pennsylvania state politics and occasionally sneaking across the border to Delaware to buy six-packs of beer. He has also lived (in order of desirability) in Brussels, Belgium, Pennsburg, Pa., Fairfield, Conn., and Rochester, N.Y. His work has appeared in Reason Magazine, National Review Online, The Freeman Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Examiner and elsewhere. He received a bachelor's degree from Fairfield University in 2009, but he refuses to hang on his wall until his student loans are fully paid off sometime in the mid-2020s. When he steps away from the computer, he enjoys drinking craft beers in classy bars, cheering for an eclectic mix of favorite sports teams (mostly based in Philadelphia) and traveling to new places.